What is your athletic background? I’ve dabbled in many sports, including soccer and aggressive inline, but I also swam, cycled, and ran throughout middle and high school. I also spent most of my childhood playing badminton and cycling with my dad. I fell in love with cross country running during high school, where I ran the famous hills in Fremont Older of California. There was something magical and alluring about a long, 10-mile run out in the trails and hills by myself that I just couldn’t get enough of. With cross country, that led to cycling with my varsity teammates, doing century rides from Cupertino to San Francisco and other endless epic rides. In college, I combined my two favorite…

In the last blog, we looked at the importance of not only knowing and maximizing the cadence rates of your bike and run but also that of your swim. In this blog, we’ll look at how to calculate your strokes per minute (SPM) and whether to slow down or speed up your rates to be as efficient and productive as possible. Slowing Down and Speeding Up First of all, you should discover for yourself what your actual SPM are. The easiest way to do this is to use Swim Smooth’s calculator and measure how long it takes you to perform 10 strokes. Follow this link to find the calculator and the pictured graph below. In fact, I will be referencing…

Triathletes like to talk a lot about bike and run cadence. We’re always striving to hit our bike cadence somewhere in the 80 to 100 RPMs range and we’re constantly trying to elevate those running strides per minute up to that magic 180 number. And yet, (at least in my experience) we all seem to curiously leave swim stroke rate out of the conversation. This is an interesting blunder for reasons difficult to understand. After all, if we know that an ideal range of RPMs or strides per minute makes us better bikers and runners, then it would only stand to reason that the same principle applies to swimming. And it does. Much like a vehicle engine, if we’re putting…

The best way to get faster in triathlon is to train hard. There’s no debate around that. But sometimes triathletes focus so much on their fitness that they forget to do the little things to make themselves faster on race day. Here are seven easy cheats for a faster triathlon. 1. Shave Everything Wind tunnel testing has shown that skin is slow. And hairy skin is even slower. (In fact, the studies have shown that hairy skin has far more of an impact than you might have thought. See: Secrets of the Wind Tunnel. This is why professional cyclists wear full, long-sleeved body suits when they compete in the time trial. However, full skin suits aren’t exactly practical for a…

Tell us about your experience at the 2017 Memorial Hermann IRONMAN North American Championship Texas in Houston? IRONMAN Texas was everything that I was hoping for in a race performance this season. When I first completed IRONMAN Wisconsin in 2015, I was very conservative. The distance intimidated me and my main goal was to cross the finish line with a smile on my face (I finished at 13:35:32). I accomplished that goal, but with too much “left in the tank.” At the Wisconsin finish line, I was proud to have finished my first IRONMAN event, but I knew that I didn’t race to my full potential. Going into IRONMAN Texas, I was looking not only for a personal best, but…

Triathlon is an exceedingly rewarding sport. But it’s also an exceedingly time consuming affair. Triathlon training requires a lot of attention because there are so many extra variables involved in multi-sport that you just don’t get in a one-trick-pony discipline like running. The more devotion you show to those variables, the greater your success will be. But then the question becomes: At what cost? There’s the financial cost of triathlon we’re all too aware of. There’s the leisure cost. There’s also potentially the physical cost. But what about the relational cost? Most of us in triathlon have normal jobs and a family. We are literally not able of making triathlon training a twenty-four/seven hobby. The more we try to, the…

Triathlon is stressful—literally. And for good reason. After all, stress is the point of good triathlon training. This is because we induce stress so as to incur a positive result later. However, to be a positive result, your body must be capable of absorbing the training in a beneficial way. The explicit capability of handling stress isn’t something a lot of triathletes consider. But think about it. Let’s say this is your first year in triathlon and you’re new to running and your coach sets you up with a workout that has you doing 50% of the total duration at threshold pace (once all of the interval durations are summed). How much of that stress do you really think is…

In the last blog, we looked at the important areas of supporting your local running shop, knowing your gate, and speed laces. Here are the final considerations you’ll need to know for your optimal triathlon shoe purchase: 4. Don’t Buy into Gimmicks The title of this rule may indicate that I’m using gimmick as a dirty word. I’m not. Sometimes gimmicks are great! Just look at the TV remote. That was a gimmick once upon a time. You certainly don’t need one. But life is definitely much better with that little black rectangle your grandparents can’t seem to figure out. Likewise, running shoe gimmicks might be totally legitimate technologies that do help with your running needs. On the other…